Mozi

Steal a peach and the whole town condemns you. Steal an ox and it is worse. Kill one man and you hang for it. So why, Mozi asks, when a ruler invades a whole country and kills thousands, does everyone call it not a crime but glory? A relentless argument that war is simply the largest theft of all.

An engineer builds a war machine that cannot be stopped, and the one man who walks to stop it carries no army — only a question the engineer cannot answer, and a belt he is about to turn into a city wall.

Every ruler wants the same three things — a rich state, a full population, a country in good order. Most get the opposite. Mozi has a blunt diagnosis and a radical fix: stop handing power to your relatives and favorites, and give it to whoever can actually do the work, farmer or artisan included.

A sage can double a state's wealth, Mozi says, and he never takes a foot of his neighbour's land to do it. The whole gain comes from one ruthless test, applied to clothes, to houses, to armies, to funerals, even to music: does this thing add use, or only cost?

Mozi watched people walk carefully around the local magistrate and then do as they pleased the moment no one was looking. They had it backwards. There is a watcher you cannot flee and a standard you cannot argue with, and its name is Heaven. Here is what Heaven wants, and how to measure your life against it.